TCC Analysis • July 11, 2024
By Art Harman, Senior Vice President – Policy · July 11, 2024
We all remember the lesson in Hans Christian Andersen’s childhood fable. Nobody dared to admit that the emperor’s exquisite new clothes didn’t exist until a little child busted the group-think lie: “but he hasn’t got anything on.”
The emperor had been told by some swindlers that “the cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office, or who was unusually stupid.”
Both the emperor and the citizenry believed the lie, because they didn’t want to admit they were stupid.
There’s a good parallel between the fable and the ongoing reactions to Biden’s disastrous debate.
Since the beginning of his 2020 race, both his campaign and White House minders covered up his mental impairment, in collusion with the liberal media and social media giants.
During 2020, they hid him in his basement, and throughout his presidency, he held only 36 real press conferences–almost always answering questions from pre-selected liberal reporters.
If you post on social media that “Biden is senile” you’ll probably get censored or ‘fact-checked.’ The networks and social media giants covered for him, often with fake excuses like he stuttered from youth, and later, identical parroting of “he’s sharp as a tack.” They knew the stark reality all along. The media also said if you supported Trump, you were racist, sexist, evil, and supported a dictator who will destroy democracy.
Over four years, many Democrat voters defended their president. Some were self-deluded that he’s ‘as sharp as a tack’ because the media told them so. Some may have inwardly cringed, but knew they couldn’t burst the bubble and admit Biden is not mentally able to be the President and Commander in Chief. They were too scared to be the ‘little child’ who wasn’t afraid to tell the truth. They were scared their friends may disown them, thinking they went ‘MAGA.’
In George Orwell’s 1984, “the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Thus, you must believe “Biden is as sharp as a tack” even if he sounds impaired. That’s how Democrats have held on to power as their party changed from JFK’s and Bill Clinton’s moderate party into a party implementing and embracing outright Marxism.
But the dam of censorship and ‘big lies’ burst before Biden’s debate even concluded. Suddenly, Democrat operatives and politicians as well as the media knew they couldn’t cover for him anymore. They knew Biden would lead them all to certain defeat. They became the most unlikely ‘little child.’
And now it’s possible the liberal media will start exposing all of the Biden family crimes that conservatives exposed over the years, but which the media censored to get him elected and remain in office.
The greatest fear of Democrat leaders and the media is that loyal Democrat voters would get wise to their manipulation and leave the party. They must be ‘kept on the reservation’ at all costs with a steady diet of lies, censorship and peer pressure.
This propaganda technique is often called ‘gaslighting’ (from the title of the 1944 film Gaslight), which is manipulating someone to believe a falsehood by unrelenting repetition, often to gain power and control.
So what else does the media cover up, censor and lie about? You know! You see it every day. You’re not supposed to object to millions of illegals, inflation, rampant crime, dangerous school curriculum, destructive ‘trans’ agenda, smothering censorship, reckless wars, and the entire woke, Democrat agenda—or even know there’s anything wrong with those.
A reason ‘gaslighting’ works so well is that many non-political people don’t intentionally seek out news, and analyze it according to their beliefs and what they view as the truth. They may not deliberately be liberals, but they go along with what the media says and seems popular. They won’t study the news, but just absorb it, in the same way as someone uninterested in growing sunflowers but heard something about them, might later chime in when a neighbor asks what to plant.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing! While we want people to help restrain our government, most people are too busy raising a family, going to college, working two jobs or enjoying retirement to focus on politics.
However, this creates a great problem for us in communicating the facts to voters. Denied the truth for so long, they really don’t know how bad it is, or that they’ve been lied to.
If you tell them that exploding crime in their city is because Democrat leaders won’t prosecute criminals, or their grocery prices are soaring due to reckless Democrat spending, they’ll discount it because the ‘respected’ media never mentions that there’s any other opinion—or tells them the proven lie that inflation was high under Trump and Biden lowered it; that we must not oppose illegal immigrants and rather show ‘compassion’ by calling them ‘migrants; and that police must be defunded to stop crime. If you tell them how children are being indoctrinated in school, they may say “but I went to that school, they wouldn’t do any such thing now.”
But perhaps the sudden bursting of the dam of falsehoods to oust Biden from the nomination will awaken some liberal voters. Perhaps they’ll see how the media lied to them for more than four years about Biden. Some might even begin to view Democrat policies as crazy.
You may find your Democrat friends will be a bit more receptive to learning that other issues they held as sacred could be as false as Biden being ‘as sharp as a tack.’ Give it a try!
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